Overview

This book explores the complex ways in which a newborn patient is constructed, perceived, and treated within the medical context. It examines how the patients’ social position is shaped by the institutional settings in which they are situated and how their identity is influenced by various factors, including biomedical, social, economic, political, and bureaucratic processes. By focusing on the newborn as a physical, social, symbolic, and even an abstract statistical unit, highlighting their role in shaping economic and symbolic performance indicators for medical institutions and drawing on prolonged fieldwork and diverse empirical data, this book gives voice to the newborn voiceless and acknowledges the difficult labor of neonatal medical professionals.

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9781666937404

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Reviews

Michel Foucault's landmark book The Birth of the Clinic did not include consideration of infants. This book cleverly takes this idea and shows how humans are not only born, they are transformed into patients at the moment of birth through the discourses and apparatuses of healthcare systems. This book is highly recommended for all those interested in the social, cultural and political construction of patienthood in neonatal care. -- Deborah Lupton, SHARP Professor, UNSW Sydney This fascinating study demonstrates how the achievements and challenges characterizing Russian neonatal care reflect significant social dynamics, from the impacts of state pronatalism and neoliberal economics, to medical professionals’ longing for occupational autonomy. Well-grounded in science studies, The Birth of the Patient breaks new ground by revealing the multiple kinds of entities produced when the medical system delivers a newborn. This book will be widely appreciated by sociologists and anthropologists of medicine as well as scholars of Russia. -- Michele Rivkin-Fish, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; author of <i>Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics</i> Bringing together sociology, anthropology, and medicine, The Birth of the Patient offers a rare and much needed ethnographic insight into neonatal resuscitation services in an increasingly reclusive society. Through in-depth interviews, observations, and archival research, the authors explain the interplay of medical, social, and political considerations in deciding the treatment of the most vulnerable patients – the newborns in critical condition. Rigorous and thought-provoking, the book will interest scholars of health systems and post-socialist moralities. -- Marius Wamsiedel, Duke Kunshan University

Author Information

Anastasia Novkunskaya is associate professor in the Institute for Interdisciplinary Health Research at the European University at Saint-Petersburg. Artemiy Minakov is research fellow at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Health Research at the European University at Saint-Petersburg. Anna Klepikova is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the European University at St. Petersburg.

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